Chapter Text
It was hard to remember Before. I caught glimpses of it sometimes, pieces coming back to me as I lay among the sheltering weeds.
Galaxies and constellations painted red.
The perpetual tug of ever-growing gravity wells.
An encroaching void swallowing the universe like spilled ink in water.
The deep, sickening dread that choked us like poison and drove us madly across the cosmos in steadily dwindling numbers, searching, searching.
The End.
The universe was coming to an end.
We knew it was, every last one of us, down to our throbbing nucleus hearts. We were trying, futilely, desperately, to stop it, to find some escape, like stars struggling against gravity’s pull as they are torn apart and devoured by the event horizon.
At one point, I can recall, it had been a long time since I had seen another of us swimming through the void. Long enough for another crimson galaxy to fade and dim and fall to black, its light never again to fill the great expanse of space. Long enough that I began to wonder, “am I the last?” The thought of being alone to face the End was almost as terrifying as the End itself. To be the last bastion of light in the universe, to be the one responsible for the extinction of all life once I inevitably failed- the idea swept over me like the shockwave of a supernova. The plasma tail behind me guttered and my molecules rattled every time I could not outswim these thoughts.
The last thing I remember of Before is noticing that I had drifted off course, the dim red lights I had been following pulled sharply to the side. What excuses I made to myself I do not know, but I knew they were not enough once I saw what I was being pulled towards.
It was like a disease, a thought of death, the failure of a heart. It was intangible, invisible, fatal. Like a riptide current, it had caught me suddenly and mercilessly unaware.
It was almost beautiful up close. I had seen it a long way off and thought it was the nova of another extinguished star. Now, the vibrant corona of compressed light and energy took a distinctly circular path, disappearing sharply at the edges of the imperceivable mass at its center.
The memory gets fuzzy as I am drawn closer in. Asteroids and exoplanets surround me, they are denser and pulled more quickly. I am a speck of dust among them, weaving from side to side, trying desperately not to be smashed and hoping beyond hope that my mass is low enough that I will be able to break free.
It’s not.
Reality warps around me, bending into a distorted halo. I do not want to look at it, do not want to face my fate. I turn my eyes toward it anyway, morbid curiosity and resignation overcoming me.
The universe turns blue as time accelerates faster and faster and faster around me. Through the looking glass of the gravity well, I see galaxies collide and diminish, I see flashes of dying stars, I see the darkness overtake all, consuming faster and faster and faster. The blackness bows and envelops me, but it is not painful. There is only the silence of the vacuum and the slowly shrinking point of light above me. I fall and fall and fall. I do not know if I am alive or if this is death. Time might have passed, I might have gone a great distance. I do not know.
What I remember best are the screams.
It felt like cracking, a violent splitting apart of everything, a sensation so all-encompassing it left no room for agony. It was bright and dark and every color on every spectrum through all of time. I was blind yet perceiving all the same, beyond the limits of my senses. My mind splintered as it joined with the consciousness of a billion others, a hive of sound and feeling stretching across time and space. It was everything everywhere, the Beginning, the End, and all that lay in between. There were no molecules to vibrate but it sounded like screaming all the same, a neverending note of terror or joy or relief. Whatever still remained of me in that place was trapped for an eternity and an instant all at once.
Then, after forever and no time at all, I felt myself dragged, tumbling, from the hivemind and falling into the pull of gravity once more. The dark light was gone, the universe was silent, and the stars shone brightly once more around me.
I landed on something rough and rocky. The sudden sensation of touch set my receptors on fire and I spasmed in pain. My body was intact, a weak trail of blue stemming from me and dissipating into the air around me.
Air.
For the first time in a millennia, I opened my gills and tasted the scent of life in a desperate and shaky gasp. I filled my lungs beyond their limits and coughed, my chest sore, my vision wobbly, and my otoliths still ringing. I sputtered, trying to move, but my weakened bones would not hold me.
A voice, deep and clacking, came to me.
“Neptune’s barnacles! A Starfish!”
I caught a glimpse of something pink before my body finally gave up and I blacked out.